Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios

Topic Last Modified: 2006-05-30

Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, combined with Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, support the use of RPC over HTTP to access Exchange servers. Using the Microsoft Windows RPC over HTTP feature to enable your users to connect to their Exchange mailbox eliminates the requirement for remote office users to use a virtual private network (VPN) to connect to their Exchange servers. Users who are running Outlook 2003 on client computers can connect directly to an Exchange server in a corporate environment from the Internet.

The Windows RPC over HTTP feature enables an RPC client (such as Outlook 2003) to establish connections across the Internet by tunneling the remote procedure call (RPC) traffic over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). RPC is not designed for use on the Internet and does not work well with perimeter networks. RPC over HTTP makes it possible to use RPC clients with perimeter networks. If the RPC client can make an HTTP connection to a remote computer that is running Internet Information Services (IIS), the client can connect to any server on the remote network that you have configured to be available to this client. The client can execute remote procedure calls to available servers on the remote network. Moreover, the RPC client and server programs can connect across the Internet—even if both are behind firewalls on different networks.